“[W]e fight because
we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore
freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we
lay waste to yours. . . Your security is in your own hands. And every
state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its
own security.”

-- Osama Bin Laden,
Al Jazeera, November 1, 2004

“The root cause of
suicide terrorism is occupation, not Islam.”

-- Robert Pape, “Al
Qaeda’s Smart Bombs,” NY Times, July 9, 2005

Tom
Friedman is the undeclared spokesman of the American establishment. His
articles represent a distillation of the current thinking among a broad
range of American mandarins, particularly members of the powerful Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR), the driving force behind much of America’s
foreign policy. He is the imperial chronicler, the man responsible for
promoting the narrow interests of elites and transforming the crimes of
the empire into a narrative of generosity and goodwill. If one can decode
Friedman’s bi-weekly hieroglyphic, they can also understand how elites use
the media to manage public perceptions.

In his latest
article, “Giving the Hate-mongers No Place to Hide,” Friedman offers his
views on both terrorism and free speech. He argues that we should pay
greater attention to “hate speech” and try to grasp its relationship to
terrorism. Friedman sees this overheated rhetoric as such an imminent
threat that he thinks “the State Department should identify the top 10
hate-mongers” and provide their names to the public.

Apart from the
McCarthy-like overtones of Friedman’s proposal, it’s hard to believe that
his contemporaries in talk-radio would be very enthusiastic about this new
idea. After all, sectarian and racial hatred have become staples on the
country’s airwaves, with many of the nation’s top broadcasters savaging
gays and Muslims on a routine basis. As Friedman knows, the issue of hate
speech is normally a question of “whose ox is being gored.”

But, Friedman’s
intention is not to take aim at the “accepted” institutions of
discrimination and racism within the body politic, but to single out
Muslims who vent their rage at American foreign policy and subject them to
public intimidation. This can be accomplished by developing a State
Department “blacklist” of anyone who utters a word against the Fatherland
and, presumably, its junior partner, Israel.

“Words matter,”
Friedman opines. “We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it
appears…When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to
retract, defend or explain them.”

Friedman’s comments
echo the Stalinesque directive from Donald Rumsfeld in May of 2005:
“People need to be very careful about what they say as well as very
careful about what they do.”

Indeed, they do, but
is that the function of government, to silence those with an unpopular
point of view? Or, are Friedman and Rumsfeld’s remarks simply intended to
have a chilling effect on free speech?

More importantly,
does “hate speech” really generate terrorism or is there a more
identifiable source?

While Friedman may
be concerned with “shutting people up,” he’s much less concerned with the
real origins of terror. His own paper, The New York Times, ran a
very scholarly article just three weeks ago by Robert Pape, “Al Qaeda’s
Smart Bombs” (7/9/05), which dismissed many of the commonly held illusions
about terrorism. Pape, who documented every case of suicide bombing
between 1980 and 2004, says that the “core motivating factor behind
suicide terrorism” is “a nationalistic response to occupation”; “The root
cause of terrorism is occupation, not Islam.”

Wow.

Pape’s “fact-based”
analysis directly challenges Friedman’s “hate mongering” theory of terror.
The distinction between the two hypotheses is colossal. If Friedman is
correct then the West is justified in invading Muslim countries to rid
them of, what Tony Blair called, “an evil ideology whose roots lie in a
perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of Islam.” This is the rationale
that supports the US occupation of Iraq, presenting the conflict as “the
central battlefield in the war on terror.”

However, if Pape’s
analysis is right then the real catalyst for terrorism is the American
occupation itself, a permanent recruiting sergeant for Muslim extremists
and jihadis. If that were the case, the only reasonable solution would be
a quick transfer of power and a complete withdrawal of American forces.

This is not a debate
that Friedman or his colleagues in the corporate establishment can afford
to lose. Pape threatens to derail the Iraqi master plan by simply
presenting the facts of his investigation and changing the hearts and
minds of the American public. That explains why every media bullhorn is
feverishly broadcasting some variant of Friedman’s “hate mongering”
theory: trying to keep alive the fading belief that America is fighting
“Islamo-fascism” in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. It is a
storyline that grows more threadbare by the day.

The UK
Independent’s Patrick Cockburn delivered a stunning blow to Friedman’s
theory last Tuesday in his aptly named article, “Iraq:
The Unwinnable War.” Cockburn states:

“The findings of an
investigation, to be published soon, into 300 young Saudis, caught and
interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow
themselves up, shows that very few had any previous contact with al-Qa'ida
or any other terrorist organization previous to 2003. It was the invasion
of Iraq which prompted their decision to die.

Some 36 Saudis who
did blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar reasons, according to
the same study, commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by a
US-trained Saudi researcher, Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to
speak to Saudi intelligence officers. A separate Israeli study of 154
foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the Global Research in
International Affairs Center in Israel, also concluded that almost all had
been radicalized by Iraq alone.”

“No contact with Al
Qaida”?... “All had been radicalized by Iraq alone”?

Do we need more
proof then this or can we put to rest Friedman’s musty ideas about Muslim
“evil-doers”. The source of the problem is not in the heart of Islam but
in the sanctuaries of the American plutocracy, where fantasists who never
held a rifle dreamt of leading the nation to war. Their muddled vision has
now produced the greatest wave of terror the world has ever seen.

Friedman
scrupulously tiptoes around the facts so he can shift the blame onto his
favorite whipping boy: radical Islam. But the problem is not the “cancer
in their midst,” as Friedman claims, but the cancer in ours. “Hate
mongers” were not responsible for the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. That
was the cynical calculation of American mandarins and their political
operatives in the White House. The war has reaped a firestorm of terror
and Friedman’s fabrications just keep fanning the flames.